falling over

hop-scotch underneath a tin roof with the rain lashing down
is where i first dreamed of you.
me- seven
you- 16 (the number of years until i would finally meet you, too.)

the first night we met i could hear soft drops on old metal.
you and me- falling over together in a playground i once knew.

birthdays

it’s not an awfully big deal i don’t think.
i just love you so awesomely that i keep dreaming that my blood runs pink;
like the fizzy lemonade we drank on the way down an icy hill from windmills shot in instant 600.
in these dreams we are standing together at a Martello tower inside of an old castle
and you are teaching me how to mix colours.

red for the clogs we chose on that first holiday; white for this first snow.

tomes

in
the
fissure

t
here is a small
black wall

that
you
can
only see if
you
are
you
but
once
were

a different person. the words
are written in chalk that is invisible to the eye of an entity that is

unalte
red
from that which it started out as.
the
language of
the inscription is one that
you, too,
will speak when you go through this trans
formation.

like
a
cater
pillar

you will
e
merge;

a
new

and ready to take f
light.

but there are
no colours
when you r
each

the
other side. all will beco
me

the void;

your meta
mo
rpho
sis pallid and ashen in the hol
lows

with
in.

hymns in mute

there was fog inside of
the outside of
our silence and all that we could see were the trees.
the map that they posted to us in another century
was sent from a country that does not even exist and you say you want to sleep.
sleep like there's no tomorrow,
sleep like yesterday is a bygone era;
sleep like you mean it.

i, on the other hand, allow for blurred lines. i may even welcome them.

all i know is that the trees are far from silent.

patterns forming on a graph

She touches the curtain the exact same amount of times every single night.

She never steps foot outside unless the correct amount of dark blue cars have passed by her front door; just to be sure.

She bathes at the same time every other day so that she doesn't get mixed up and break the required routine.

But somehow or other she never makes anything any better.

Everything remains dark, unchanging and all encompassing; no matter how hard she tries she can never escape the reality of all that has now become lost.

a dictionary of the sea; part one

She fears that she may be slowly drowning (except that water is no longer in existence.) He holds onto her ever so tight; he has had nightmares that comprise of him crawling around the inside of an old tin box-the rust taking the shape of maps baring cruel seas. She imagines a gang of pirates making her walk the plank. But they are made back-to front and she never quite knows which one is presently abusing her. In his hallucinations he is no longer himself; rather he is a survivor of a ship-wreck that never really happened. But somehow he has found himself eternally alive, (yet dead) at the bottom of a very dark Ocean. Sometimes she deludes herself into the thought that this all happened. Most times though she tries to envisage that it didn’t. His reveries are more trance-like; he hears his own soul commanding him to have courage. They wander from edge to edge on an atlas that doesn’t have a grid.

she wears a diadem

on the days in between the seven weekdays I try to sleep.
There is nothing else for it
and the paper boat doesn't have warm water in those times or i would draw a bath
(i would use my best purple pencil,
as a mark of respect for my mourning)

adding up

i am . . . .

. . . falling backwards into you
and
i don't
know

-what
is



and what may and what

has been and what will/ may/ shall

be and remain ever and ever and
what
when
and then
some
add ten.

'colour coded' - a short introduction

i dream of you in colours that are not even real.

in my dreams you whisper to me in a language i am sure has never once been spoken before you took it as your own.
you wear trousers and cardigans either long gone out of fashion or that will be something our children's children will wear (and i know, despite being asleep, that these said 'children' will be one in the same).

in these dreams you sing lullabies that wet my sleep filled eyes and gladden my adoring heart.

we live in a house that is surrounded by trees and foliage foreign to me (never, in all of my rambling wanderings, have i seen such a green.)
and you speak to me of afternoons on a beach i have never been to, swept along by a wind whose breath i have never felt.

but it in these dreams there lies no grey area, lover of mine.
it is always, always and always you.

an invitation

Do you see that little rain-drop over there on that dirty window?

(It is shaped like a capital 'O' in old typewriter font with a day old smudge by a child's baby finger).

Well inside of it are all my dreams, hopes, wishes, desires, fears, worries, anxieties, smiles, belly-laughs, head-colds, lazy afternoons and dips in the icy New Year's day ocean.

There you shall find my summer dresses, my winter mittens, my old cameras with which to record the passing of the seasons; the passage of the years.

On the very top stair of it you may hold every word I have ever made in your hands for as long as you like.

And if you wait inside of it until the fall of night you and I shall sit together under the stars of its sky and whisper our secrets to the soft winds from the North.

Do you see that little rain-drop, over there? I have left the keeper of its gardens your name (the gate is rusty and painted yellow),
so that he may let you in.
(In case you come whilst I am asleep).

a story of a beautiful little donkey

once upon a time, when beautifully coloured aeroplanes flew high in the big blue sky above a little green Island, when ladies wore pinnies with polkadots and small boys played with tin soldiers while their daddies fought with real ones there lived a little donkey. He lived in a field in the middle of nowhere and he spent all of his days and nights on his own; cold, scared and lonely. He saw (from time to time) some cows and goats. They would eat grass and while away the hours doing things that the little donkey hated. But he was so warm and kind and he had so much love to give on that farm that they were better than nothing. But the little donkey felt that none of the other animals knew him. They didn't light up when he ' naaaayyy'ed (if they had really, really known him they would of understood the huge sand-castles of words that he was trying to whisper to them. They were oh, so foolish.) . . .

. . . Over time though, the little donkey began to listen to the word of a huge oak tree in his field. He told him that there was a little girl in the little cottage (white with a swing on the second monkey tree and with little coloured-y lights on) that loved him more than all the cinnamon bark in India, all the tea-dress in London town and all the books in Trinity College Dublin. And so the little donkey found the little girl that he had loved so long also, from his beautiful field, and they have loved one another enchantedly, magically, dutifully and perfectly, ever since.
And would you believe that to this very day, everyone that passes that old field, wonders and wonders and wonders to themselves, where oh where could that old donkey have gone . . .

at some point

at some point i shall sit down opposite you on a long train journey and explain to you what happened.
i will remind you of the nights i spent (shivering, with teeth that chattered like tin cans in the boot of an old car)
on the sofa ; so i would not give you my cold.
i will talk to you of the times i begged you to let me cook something i wanted, for once.
i will recall you holding my camera from me whilst on a beach in India (I didn't want to waste the film, just have one photo of the fisherman to look back upon)
i will tell you that you were wrong. that i do forgive you but that you simply weren't the one.
i will tell you of my 'one' and of the lasagne that he lets me make him (even though this time around he is the better cook)
at some point that train journey will happen for you. even without me ever being there.
at some point.

‘A measure of the earth’ or a short history of geometry

He gazes at the list in front of him, completely mesmerised. He had never, ever dreamed there would be so many. Before he had gone looking for this list he had thought there would be around twenty. The obvious ones (circle, square, triangle) and then some more complex ones (rhombus, oval, octagon and the like). He feels especially stupid today. This little boy feels stupid every waking moment of every day in this strange land but today the idiocy is more notable to him, more repulsive.

He scans over the ancient words in awe. Polygon (concave, constructible, convex, cyclic, decagon, digon, dodecagon, nonagon, equiangular, equilateral, star), henagon, hendecagon, heptagon, hexadecagon, hexagon, icosagon, pentagon, octagon, decagram, octagram, heptagram, hexagram, pentagram, triangle ( acute, anticomplementary, equilateral, excentral , isosceles, medial, obtuse, rational, right, isosceles right, Reuleaux , Kepler, scalene), parallelogram, equilateral parallelogram: rhombus, Lozenge, rhomboid, rectangle, square, trapezium, isosceles trapezium, quadrilateral, cyclic quadrilateral, tetrachord, kite, tangential quadrilateral, trapezoid, isosceles trapezoid, circle ( circumcircle, excircle, incircle, nine-point, circular sector, circular segment) , crescent, ellipse, oval, Reuleaux polygon, rotor, lens, rounded rectangle, semicircle, sphere, stadium, Archimedean spiral.

He realises that the sole purpose of this classification is to separate each individual structure based wholly on its difference from the other. He feels a pain he has just about managed to forestall his entire short life up until this point. He holds his breath and counts to twelve but he still feels shrouded in the darkness. The book’s coloured outlines and contours are suffocating him, slowly. He will never know what shape the folk of his soil fall into. He sees not what way their lines point, nor does he know how black a silhouette their pain embodied on paper maps. Equally so, he cannot dare to try to read the contours of the landscape he inhabits due to reasons unknown to his little mind. (Its people lie down proudly in their own shape formations and there is no space in their tessellation for his alien hemitery.)

The break-down of shapes is beginning to make his eyes sting with angry, scared tears. He could never fit in a place that he has only experienced, (like his furniture, clothes and handful of personal belongings) - second-hand. He would feel as isolated in that land his Mother had fled with him in belly as he does here in the only land he has known, without knowing. He has not yet read any Said, Bhabha or Fanon but when he does he will understand more. He will feel the full gravity of his loss. He will see that his young mind was forced to surrender a little bit of innocence there and then, doing this homework of ‘An introduction to Geometry’. He understands now, at this point however, that so many people in his world see themselves as one particular shape, and him as another. And these shapes are universes, never mind continents or centuries apart. The little boy will spend many years trying to morph himself into one shape, then another and yet another still. In his nightmare-filled sleep he will fight and revolt against the idea that people are just like shapes. In his despair he will try to deny that both label the others around them through surface configurations that distinguish one thing from its surroundings. He tries so hard to refute this because it makes the aching loneliness in his bones ease for a moment. But in the harsh light of day, he cannot hide from the truth. It sneaks up on him at every given opportunity and punches him hard as ever in the stomach. And he is lucky that he has not been assigned any shape whatsoever in this life, or these blows to his ghost-shadow might leave a mark.

Letters for my father

I have (hidden at the bottom of my wooden bed) a box full of letters for you.
1st one dated six days post your leaving.
Last one-undated. (I no longer offer you my time, nor its recording in my handwriting.)
I shall never post these to your home.
Nor shall I burn these in a pile of autumnal leaves (their red and orange beauty does not deserve my hate.)

It is snowing in Edinburgh and I am healing.
I (too) will have beautiful, loving children.
They will throw your letters to the afternoon sky.
Paper aeroplanes of my words; like snowflakes,
cleansing, dancing, swirling, melting.

[This piece may also be named - 'A work spanning my winters from the ages of 8 til 25' ]

Things to do when you get there

Sleep.
Worry that you have actually got there and not dreamt it,
awaken.
Continue to worry that you are not presently dreaming,
drink very strong coffee,
floss.
Read ' The encyclopedia of getting there' from cover to cover (spending extra and special time on the 'activities on arrival' section).
Talk yourself into the the thought that you have never even experienced desire to get there, nor wanted to do anything upon arrival.
Drink even more, even stronger coffee.
Weep.
Drink some wine, weep in a foreign language.
Burn your possessions. Cough. Sleep.
Weep whilst sleeping, laugh, awaken.
Smile. Draw a bath.
Laugh in native and foreign tongues.
Collate a list of things to do when you get there.
Rinse in icy cold water and repeat . . .
. . . . etc et etc et etc et etc et etc et etc . . .

[6th January was the day on which this was created. It was at Napier University Edinburgh after reading Siegfried Sassoon's 'Aftermath'.]

an old green book

When she awakens she will aim to will herself into the gargantuan task of subtracting her body from [her] bed. An undertaking that will tick both the boxes of ‘colossal’ and ‘inconsequential’ in its happening. It will go something along the lines of – bed minus awakened sleeper equals ‘normal’ existence on score-sheet.

After all, what else should one suppose ‘subtraction’ to mean? Whilst still not stolen from her slumber, she lifted a small green dictionary from a neighbouring continent (cutting herself on four separate occasions in a hidden spinney) and found herself the very word in hand. From the long list she translated – ‘taking away, exclusion, deletion, omission, amputation, cutting out.’ She removes herself from the tall tree she is presently perched on while dead to those awake and makes her decision.

Her impending arising will have no bearing on life as she knows or does not know it. In fact she would go as far as to say, even whilst still unconscious, that for her to awaken at all would tick more than just the ‘inconsequential’ box aforementioned. She considered something more along the lines of ‘infinitesimal in occurrence’.

She sits with the stolen dictionary and decides she shall instead subtract herself from herself. It will go something along the lines of – myself minus myself equals something good. She will take the stolen, foreign, green dictionary and superglue it inside her in her place. So that those that would await her awakening (although without some thinking time she can name none) will be addressed by a dusty, pilfered, foreign tome (S-W in a dictionary cut into irregularly spaced volumes). Before she rolls onto her other side, never to awaken again, she looks up ‘tome’ and reads as follows - ‘volume, section of a book, originally; section, piece cut out.’ Whilst still asleep, as she will be forever, she weeps.